Skip to content
FREE Scaling Up Assessment

Category Archives: leadership

What’s your financial context?

I recently had two interesting conversations about financial context, and the way leaders think about revenue and opportunity. In the first case, the executive team was presenting a case study about a new service offering. This new business initiative was worth around $2M in revenue – frankly a sum that is dwarfed by their core business, but it has massive potential, and is likely to scale as a significant part of their 5-year strategy.

Reading the conditions

How do you set your future agenda – is it based on personal objectives, or do you research and run tests? How do you go about benchmarking in your specialty or industry? Whichever way you keep score, it’s all about reading the conditions, so you can obtain a view of current state and your desired future and, with these assessments in hand, plan how to get there.

Evolving Beyond Being ‘The Leader’ To Real Leadership

This article, written by Michael Nathanson originally appeared on chiefexecutive.net on July 9, 2021 CEOs practically may be the singular “chief” executive officers of their companies, but that does not mean they must think or act like they are the only leader at the top.

The illusion of certainty

The lifetime customer, the iron-clad supplier, the legislated right to operate – it can all change at the stroke of a pen … or the start of a pandemic. I had an interesting discussion with a prospect recently about starting or waiting. He’s looking to double his significant mid-tier business over the next 3-5 years and he’d also like to significantly increase the profit margin to 20% rather than the current 10%.

Are you playing the game or imposing yourself?

Success in professional sports this year has been not only about survival of the fittest, but survival of those able to adapt to change – just as we have experienced in business. Spring is high season for sports competition here in Australia – including Australian Football League (AFL) finals, interstate rugby play-offs and thoroughbred horse racing carnivals. So you get a good look at who’s best and who makes up the rest.

Obstacle course, sprint or marathon?

I was re-reading Jack Stack’s ‘A Stake in the Outcome’ over the last couple of weeks and a comment he made about the nature of the business race we’re running really jumped out at me. Teams would probably associate their long-term goal, or BHAG as Jim Collins calls it, as a marathon; an event of known length. At the opposite end of the spectrum there’s the encouragement to sprint towards near-term goals, often with a Scrum or Agile approach as recommended by Jeff Sutherland.

Do you live by rules or conventions?

I recently spent time in the company of Dr Kaihan Krippendorff, an inspiring strategist I had the privilege to meet through the Gazelles Coaching program. Kaihan is a business strategist, keynote speaker, consultant and best-selling author of four books, most recently Outthink the Competition. A former consultant with McKinsey & Company, he now writes one of the most popular blogs on fastcompany.com, ‘Outthinkers’.

Are You a Transformational Leader?

A Key Challenge A key challenge for my clients is that the pursuit of fast growth requires a series of transformations in their business. By definition we can’t dramatically drive up performance without making a number of changes: perhaps some different roles and people, a new strategy, a switch of emphasis in the client/product mix, some new execution disciplines and so on. But this puts an added load on the leaders, so what can we do?